Healing the Wounds: An Example from the Sky Islands - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 192

Parks and all the other trappings of conservation, are so badly damaged that only tour-
ists and others ecologically color-blind, can look upon them without a feeling of sadness
and regret. 3
10.1 Introduction
Far before his time in his ability to wisely read the story of the land, Leopold understood
that free Apaches kept settlement out of the northern Sierra Madre Occidental well into
the twentieth century. Without livestock grazing and with healthy populations of moun-
tain lions and wolves, mountain ecosystems in Mexico were ecologically healthy, whereas
similar mountain ecosystems in the United States were deeply wounded. 3 Unfortunately,
since Leopold's time, the mountain vastness of northern Mexico has been as carelessly
exploited as the southwestern United States.
In recent years, ecological and historical researchers have greatly improved our under-
standing of the ecological wounds in the Sky Islands region (see Chapter 7). Even in the
best-protected areas, such as national parks and wilderness areas ungrazed by domestic
livestock, preexisting wounds may continue to suppurate. 4 For example, without wolves,
natural fire, and recovered riparian forests ( bosques ), even the large Gila Wilderness Area
is not a healthy landscape; in fact, without restoration, its health may continue to decline.
Efforts to protect the land and create a sustainable human society in the Sky Islands
region will come to naught without understanding these wounds and their underlying
causes and then attempting to heal them. More than 60 years ago, Aldo Leopold 3 worried
that “our own conservation program for the [Sky Islands] region has been in a sense a
post-mortem cure.” Medicine for the land, or ecological restoration, has advanced much
in the last 60 years (or so we trust). Perhaps, we can raise this Lazarus of a landscape to
robust good health (Figure 10.1). It is, at the very least, our duty as conservationists to try.
The human history of the Sky Islands region is a litany of anthropogenic wounds to ter-
restrial and aquatic communities. Even the earliest humans in the region, the Clovis cul-
ture of big game hunters, around 13,000 years ago (calendar years or 11,000 uncalibrated
radiocarbon years ago) wounded the land by causing the Pleistocene megafauna extinc-
tion, in which 33 out of 45 genera of large mammals in North America became extinct. 5
Martin and Burney 6 identify 27 species of mammals larger than 100 lb that became extinct
in the western United States and northern Mexico alone at that time. The overwhelm-
ing evidence points to human hunting as the major cause. Among the animals lost in
the Sky Islands region were mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, tapirs, shrub oxen,
musk oxen, llamas, peccaries, bison, mountain goats, mountain deer, giant ground sloths,
glyptodonts, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, shortfaced bears, American lions, American
cheetahs, and giant condors. 5,7 Some authorities, including Paul Martin of the University of
Arizona, believe that the plant communities of the region are still in disequilibrium from
this loss—an example of a long-festering ecological wound precipitated by the cessation of
top-down regulation 6 (see Chapter 6).
With the arrival of Europeans in the Sky Islands region less than 200 years ago (300 years
ago for the Santa Cruz Valley), the land again suffered deep and debilitating wounds. Of
these ecological wounds, we have identified six as major. Each of these has more than one
cause, and several of the causes contribute to more than one wound. The overall impact of
these wounds is greater than their sum.